The night I met Allen Ginsberg in
1976, his lifelong companion Peter Orlovsky raised a handkerchief to Allen's
nose a fraction of a second before he sneezed. We were in a basement club in
Greenwich Village commemorating the death of Neal Cassady, one of Allen's great
loves, and the muse of Jack Kerouac's novel On
the Road. The poet had a bad cold, and it was his second reading of the
night.

Anticipating Allen's need for a
handkerchief was just one way Peter manifested what photographer Elsa Dorfman
called his "unearthly sensitivity and caring" in an email to a friend
after Peter died last Sunday. Kids, animals, and growing things adored Peter.
Just before writing "Howl," Allen pledged his love to him,
recognizing in him a character out of a Russian novel: the saintly shepherd, a
holy innocent. In Foster's cafeteria in San Francisco in 1955, the two men
grasped hands and vowed never to go to heaven unless the other could get in ––
a true marriage of souls. "At that instant we looked into each other's
eyes," Allen told interviewer Allen Young in 1972, "and there was a
kind of celestial cold fire that crept over us and blazed up and illuminated
the entire cafeteria and made it an eternal place."

At Allen's urging, Peter also
became a poet. In 1978, City Lights published a collection of his work with the
memorable title Clean Asshole Poems and
Smiling Vegetable Songs. (The vegetables were those Peter grew with
tireless enthusiasm on the couple's organic farm in Cherry Valley, New York,
bought as a respite from the grit and druggy temptations of their neighborhood
on the Lower East Side.) While no one would have compared Peter's creative
output to Allen's, his poems – sometimes only a single line – could be
remarkably pure and surprising, even luminous.

Peter, Cherry Valley, 1979.

Poet Thom Gunn once told me that
the 19th century British poet and artist William Blake – whom
Ginsberg took as his first guru -- had written in the voice of an aggrieved
adult child, a grown man who saw the suffering of the world free of the
blinders of conventional wisdom and dull maturity. That was Peter, too,
responding empathetically to every sentient being around him, from a starving
leper on the streets of Benares to a pig with a broken jaw at the farm. Even
Peter's idiosyncratic spelling (his first poem was published with the title
"Frist Poem") insisted on its own untrammeled vitality; his poems
were like goofy, glorious weeds flowering in the cracks of official
"poetic" language.

Impossible
happiness said the moon tooning its guitar

*

My
heart is always not in the right place

*

I
just dident expect to see the same

horrible
infested condition on the

exact
opposite side of her body –

I
was now more surprissed and

taken
aback – and now I Looked

into
her eyes & she had very

dark
olive calm eyes peasefull sweet sad

eyes
that seemed to tell me

I
am okay – its nice of you

to
have some food brought to me

and
I want to thank you

but
I don't know yr Language

so
I say silently with my

eyes…

*

My
body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning of life

A few months after the reading in
the Village, I became one of Allen's apprentices in the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Other
writer-heroes of mine, like William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, taught there
too, as did Buddhist teachers like Jack Kornfield and Taizan Maezumi-roshi,
founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center, who showed me how to meditate. It was
Allen's belief that the best education came not from niggling over line breaks
and metaphors in airless workshops, but from living with poets and seeing how
their minds worked in ordinary situations. (In an old Hasidic folktale, a young
man says he is making a pilgrimage to a renowned rabbi not to discuss Torah,
but to watch him tie his bootlaces.)

One virtue of this approach was
that seeing a world-famous poet in his underwear in the morning, turning the
pages of The New York Times, tended
to strip one of exalted illusions. These Beat Generation icons sweated,
gossiped, got crabby about the littlest things, schlepped to the supermarket
(except when they had me do it), made clumsy passes at sexy young poets, and
had enormous and very fragile egos. In short, they were a mess, but as my
Buddhist poet friend Marc Olmsted puts it in his best Burroughsian drawl,
"It's Samsara, my dear, we're all a mess."

Yet they got it done ––the Real Work of making poems, building
community, and encouraging each other to be honest, conscious, and awake to the
fierce beauty of every passing moment, every breath. At Naropa, life, art, and
Buddhist practice were indistinguishable. That was the point.

That said, when I started coming to
Allen's townhouse apartment in the mornings to transcribe his notebooks, I was
a little shocked to find Peter snoring on the couch as some handsome aspiring
Beat strolled down from the master bedroom in a towel. It was only years later
that I fully understood the intricacies of Allen's and Peter's arrangement.
Though they were the first gay male couple that many people had ever heard of,
Peter wasn't, in any strict sense, gay. He was more physically attracted to
women, and responded to them in ways that Allen couldn't. They both had other
lovers on the side. So why had Peter virtually married Allen?

Because they adored one another. They
were soul brothers, beyond categories. Their love and mutual devotion was
another weed that flourished in the cracks –– an impossible happiness.

Allen, Peter, and Julius Orlovsky, Cherry Valley,
1980.

Not that the impossible is easy. My
first summer at Naropa, Peter was in marvelous shape. He was tanned and
muscular from working on the farm, meditating a lot, and eating healthily.
(Like Allen, he touted the life-saving virtues of whatever latest food kick he
was on, from bee pollen to macrobiotics. On a typical morning at the farm in
1979, he told the young poet Cliff Fyman, "Molasses makes you shit good
and feel at one with the universe and natural earth cycle!") Best of all,
Peter wasn't drinking or on hard drugs that summer. He glowed. Ever willing to
help, he chauffeured famous poets, musicians, and gurus around Boulder, kept
the townhouse spotless, and provided a buffer for Allen, who was
shorter-tempered than usual, perhaps because his father Louis had died just a
few months before. Peter kept a benevolent eye on the scruffy members of
Allen's inner circle even when Allen was too busy being legendary to do so. The
day I told Peter that I was going to San Francisco for the first time, he
patted 19-year-old me on the head and said, "Oooh, don't get in
trouble."

Peter knew from trouble. Growing up
on Long Island, the Orlovskys had been so poor they lived in a chicken coop.
Peter's mother, brothers, and sister spent most of their lives in institutions,
struggling with schizophrenia, mental retardation, and other conditions. His
mother Kate had been struck deaf and partially paralyzed in a botched operation
by a drunk doctor. No wonder Peter grew into a young man attuned to the
suffering of others. When Allen met him in 1954, Peter had been expelled from
the Army –– where he worked as an ambulance driver –– for telling a
psychiatrist, "An army with guns is an army against love."
Photographs of Peter with his family are heart-wrenching: the holy innocent in
a charnel ground.

Marie, Peter, and Kate Orlovsky, Huntington, Long
Island, 1979.

Together Peter and Allen traveled
all over, sowing seeds of poetry, tenderness, public candor, and American
Buddhism worldwide. They hung out with Burroughs in Tangier, smoked ganja and
contemplated burning corpses in ghats along the Ganges, wrote Charlie Chaplin a
fan letter from Benares [see http://
www.stevesilberman.com/ginsberg/Letter%20to%20Charlie%20Chaplin.MP3],
and visited the young Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. They also meditated
side-by-side on railroad tracks in Denver to block a delivery of radioactive
material to the leak-prone Rocky Flats nuclear power plant. Often, a reading by
Allen at some illustrious academic institution would feature Peter
unselfconsciously yodeling away with a banjo about the joys of shoveling shit
on their farm.

Alas, when I returned to Naropa in
1987 to be Allen's teaching assistant, it was Peter who had gotten into
trouble. He was using heavy drugs, getting angry a lot, and got into a drunken
brawl with British psychologist R.D. Laing that resulted in 60-year-old Allen
bruising his knee and tailbone, and fracturing his pinky, when the police
accidentally shoved him to the ground. ("The sidewalk reared up and
whacked me on the ass!" Allen told their friends.)

Peter's genes were stacked against
him. His last years with Allen were difficult, as his drug and drinking
problems, aggravated by bouts of psychosis, got the upper hand. On the advice
of singer Marianne Faithfull, Allen and Peter sought the help of a 12-step
program. There, Allen came to understand the ways that he had unconsciously
encouraged Peter's dependence on him. They even officially separated for a
time, while Peter continued to have girlfriends. But Allen made sure that his
old buddy always had a roof over his head.

When Allen drew his last breaths
after midnight on April 5, 1997, Peter was beside him. "Goodbye,
darling," he said, kissing the poet's head just before the moment of
death, making good on his vow.

The last time I saw Peter was
shortly after that, at an auction of Allen's shirts, photographs, and other
personal effects at Sotheby's in New York City. The blue-haired ladies taking
names at the door looked wary of the bearded stranger claiming to be on the
guest list. "Well, who are you?" one of them finally asked. "I'm
Mrs. Allen Ginsberg!" Peter roared. They let him in.

And Allen made good on his vow to
Peter as well. Money from the Ginsberg Trust helped Peter escape the city and
buy a modest house in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. There, Chuck and Judy Lief,
senior students of Allen's Buddhist teacher, the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche, cared for him in his last years, with the help of other member of the
Shambhala sangha.

Peter died of lung cancer at the
Vermont Respite House in Williston on Sunday morning, May 30, 2010, surrounded
by old friends like poet Anne Waldman, co-founder of the JackKerouacSchool.Chuck wrote to me shortly after Peter died:

Despite
becoming more and more reliant on oxygen, Peter was a dedicated member of the
small St. Johnsbury meditation center, and a frequent participant at
celebrations and major events at Karme Choling. He had a meditation instructor,
and looked forward to getting copies of each new book of the Vidyadhara's teachings
as they were published. He enjoyed receiving letters and calls from old
friends. Even though he did not write in the later years, Peter noticed
everything going on around him, using the poet's mind which Allen found so
naturally present.

Goodbye little Peter, gentle Peter.
Never will I forget how sweet you were.

Peter, Cherry Valley, 1980.

[“Impossible Happiness: An elegy
for Peter Orlovsky” originally appeared in the Shambhala SunSpace blog (http://www.shambhalasun.com/sunspace/?p=16901).Reprinted with permission of Steve
Silberman. Original photos by Cliff
Fyman, used by permission of the author.]